The Medieval Era is often overlooked when it comes to their accomplishments in the progression of science and technology. At a third level, the book urged a degree of scepticism about historical generalisations: society in the Middle Ages was not a system, and so cannot be properly understood through models.Sydney Fitch Levi Williams Joe Lady Alexandria Alabau Madison Bolick CaitlinHall and Leta Kate Lamb Introduction Reynolds thus suggested that ‘feudalism’ never really existed. At another level, Reynolds’ book made an argument for a revised view of medieval European society, in which collective action and public order were always at least as significant as private legal arrangements based on conditional landholding. Medieval elites did not always think of their lands as ‘fiefs’, and when they did, it wasn’t clear that this entailed any specific kind of obligation to their superiors. At one level, the book was an extraordinarily detailed empirical study, showing that the distinctive terminology of feudalism was used less, and less consistently, in Europe in the Middle Ages than historians had believed, misled by the theoretical speculations of later medieval lawyers. It was partly in response to this confusion that in 1994 Susan Reynolds published a remarkable book, Fiefs and Vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted. There is more than one understanding of feudalism in historiographical circulation By this definition, many parts of the world for much of recorded history could be defined as feudal, not just medieval Europe. These tenants, or peasants, were constrained by various extra-economic ties to their landlords, but retained a great deal of autonomy in how they organised their labour within a family structure. Feudalism in this tradition became a label for an economy where most work was done not by enslaved people (as Karl Marx imagined had been the case in the ancient world), nor by wage labourers (as is the case in industrialised societies), but by tenant farmers. Here feudalism refers not so much to the legal technicalities of fiefs and vassalage, but to the economic circumstances which underpinned them. The first to emerge was a Marxist understanding. (Image by Getty Images)įrom this original concept of feudalism, historians developed two other approaches. In the oldest understanding of feudalism, explains Prof Charles West, a landed estate would be granted by a lord to someone, sometimes called a vassal, in exchange for a promise of loyalty. Many of these questions were first aired systematically in a work known as the Libri Feudorum (‘Books of Fiefs’), a mid 12th-century legal compilation made in northern Italy.Ī vintage engraving of a medieval lord receiving a grant of land from a king. Could a vassal sell their fief to a third party? Was a fief hereditary? What could a lord reasonably ask their vassal to do? Did vassals have obligations to their lord’s lord? And so on. From the later Middle Ages, lawyers piled elaboration after elaboration on this basic relationship, exploring all the implications in great technical detail. A fief was typically a landed estate which was granted by a lord to someone, sometimes called a vassal, in exchange for a promise of loyalty, sometimes termed homage. This thinks of feudalism as a post-Roman legal system, based on the fief (Latin: feodum). In fact there are three distinctive historiographical traditions within which feudalism has played a major role – or, put differently, three slightly different answers to the question: ‘What was feudalism?’ The first, and the oldest, is a legal tradition, stretching back to the French philosopher Montesquieu (d1755).
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